Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2026

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Mohammad Ayoubi

Abstract

Pegasus is an autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft developed for the Vertical Flight Society Design-Build-Vertical Flight competition and designed around the operational needs of early-stage wildfire response. The system was developed to provide rapid aerial situational awareness, stable hover capability, modular payload deployment, and autonomous mission execution in environments where conventional reconnaissance methods may be limited by terrain, visibility, response time, or personnel risk. The final aircraft uses a hexacopter configuration with six electric propulsion units, a modular aluminum airframe, independent propulsion and avionics power systems, a Cube Orange+ flight controller, adaptive landing gear, and a bottom-mounted payload mechanism.

The aircraft was designed using a systems-engineering process that translated competition rules, stakeholder needs, and wildfire-response constraints into measurable requirements. Key design targets included a maximum takeoff weight below 25 lb, a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than 2.0, hover throttle below 60%, minimum mission endurance above 10 minutes, maximum structural deflections below 1 mm, minimum factor of safety greater than 2.0, and sufficient separation between rotor excitation frequencies and structural natural frequencies. The completed aircraft achieved an estimated takeoff weight of 18.02 lb, a thrust-to-weight ratio of 2.66, hover throttle near 47%, estimated mission endurance of 10.6 minutes, maximum structural deflection of 0.207 mm, minimum factor of safety of 2.04, and a first modal frequency of 89.985 Hz.

Validation was performed through propulsion sizing, structural finite element analysis, modal analysis, sensitivity analysis, ground testing, hover testing, manual controls testing, and autonomous mission testing. The results demonstrated that Pegasus satisfied the major DBVF competition requirements while maintaining conservative stability, structural, and propulsion margins. Although additional testing would be required before deployment in real wildfire conditions, the project demonstrated the feasibility of a modular autonomous multirotor platform for wildfire reconnaissance and lightweight payload pickup and delivery.

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